Memory-maker Kingston Digital announced Monday a new addition to its range of solid-state drives. The latest addition, dubbed the SDDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive, aims to offer an effective and competitively-priced SSD to serve as a boot-drive that supplements your existing hard drive.

Kingston positions the new 2.5-inch drive exclusively as a boot-drive. The idea is for you to store your operating system and applications on the SSD to improve load speeds, while keeping all other data--such as music, photos and videos--on a more capacious hard disk drive. This approach makes some sense; it offers desktop users a quick and easy way to gain additional performance from their existing systems, in addition to potentially accelerating the PC start-up and shutdown, and the load time of applications. The 40GB Boot Drive is rated at 170MB per second read speed, with write speeds at 40MB per second.

The SSDNow V Series 40GB Boot Drive will be available starting November 9, priced at $115--a relatively low price for an SSD. In addition to being offered as a stand-alone drive, Kingston will also make the drive available in a special bundle which includes everything needed to clone your old HDD drive for an additional $15.